Kama-Gita: règles de l’amour (Kama-Gita: The Rules of Love) represents a very different facet of Mourier’s output from his press cartoons  – his erotic illustration work, a not uncommon sideline for satirical artists in interwar Paris – and it demonstrates both his artistic skills and his graphic wit. The title Kama-Gita is itself a creative invention, blending the Sanskrit kama (desire) with gita (song/verse, as in the Bhagavad Gita), effectively meaning ‘song of love’, a clever nod to the kama sutra tradition of Vatsyayana, the ancient Indian sage to whom the famous erotic treatise is attributed.

The publication's format, twenty-four pochoir (stencil-coloured) erotic drawings, each paired with a brief descriptive text of sexual positions, printed in a run of only 500 copies on heavy paper with no publisher, place or date listed, is characteristic of the clandestine erotic publishing trade that flourished in France between the wars. Such works were produced privately to avoid censorship, distributed discreetly, and rarely entered institutional collections. Its complete absence from Pascal Pia's authoritative Livres de l’enfer bibliography confirms the extraordinary rarity of this little book.

What makes Kama-Gita particularly poignant is the tragic irony that its illustrator, a committed libertarian who drew erotically playful work in peacetime, would within a decade be dead in a Nazi concentration camp for his work forging papers to save persecuted people.